Looking for some guidance in starting with WordPress

[Jeanco]

Hello,

I currently use Blogger to keep a personal blog - just something that lets friends and family keep up with me while I'm studying at University.

What I want to do is switch software. I'm very comfortable with PHP/SQL and it seems Word Press is the overwhelming winner. I'm hoping some of you can point me in the right direction as far as learning how to customize it.

Here is what I want to do:
1) Transform my blog into something more technically-oriented. Specifically, I will be posting more about PHP/mySQL programming, and providing code snippets, etc.

2) I want to be able to categorize each post into the appropriate area (I know this is available by default), but I also want to have a sort of "homepage" for each topic rather then just a list of all the posts tagged with that title. That is, I want a section for each (well, most) topics I post about and that section should have custom layout.

3) Any sites that you find you frequent when looking for new ideas when customizing word press.

Any help to guide me, especially with #2, would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[fonzerelli_79]

i use wordpress on a few site and know the software pretty well. drop me a pm with any questions and ill do my best to help

[Azmeen]

Number 2 is actually very easy to implement.

By default, WP searches for the template file archives.php when presenting posts within a particular category (if it doesn't exist, WP will then use index.php). This is the file where you'll be doing customisations.

Essentially, you'll need to use a switch or if..then..else control structure to customise the output. The variable that you'd use to manipulate the output would primarily be $cat_id.

[fonzerelli_79]

Number 2 is actually very easy to implement.

By default, WP searches for the template file archives.php when presenting posts within a particular category (if it doesn't exist, WP will then use index.php). This is the file where you'll be doing customisations.

Essentially, you'll need to use a switch or if..then..else control structure to customise the output. The variable that you'd use to manipulate the output would primarily be $cat_id.

you could also just use the pages function as well

for example, say he has 3 categories

Site News
PHP
MYSQL

Home Page

You can leave this to default and just display the latest posts or you can go to options, reading, Reading Options and change it so that the home page is static or from a specific category

Category Home Pages

He could create a 'homepage' for each section and, using the post slug, the url would still be nice (assuming the mod rewrite through permalinks had been done)

so he would have 3 homepages
eg.
http://www.ryanprice.ca/blog/site-news/
http://www.ryanprice.ca/blog/php/
http://www.ryanprice.ca/blog/mysql/

If the pages list was automatically generated using :

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>' ); ?>

then he would have to list the pages manually.

I think this would work as you dont have to change code etc.The pages would bring the visitor to the respective home pages but the category listing
would still show Site News, PHP and MYSQL so visitors could view the latest posts through that area (and perhaps the home page too).

[Jeanco]

Thanks for the help thus far everyone. I've successfully converted my blog over from Blogger to WordPress and will begin playing with it shortly.

Does anyone know of a place that covers all the WordPress functions? I found this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference but it only has a selected number of functions that have an explanation. Has anyone put together a thorough reference of the functions WP uses similar to how PHP.net?

Thanks.

[OrangeCreative]

Try this for the functions:
http://guff.szub.net/wordpress/template-tags/